Avec nos cheveux (With our hair)
Synthetic hair, various objects, black wrap, acrylic paint
Variable dimensions, approx. 400 × 245 cm
2013—2015
After having exhausted the photographic image, Annette Messager went on to manipulate human bodies, dismembered and in relief. Body parts of women and men, the head of a chubby baby resembling a Chinese mask, an enormous breast... Hybrid associations as previously imagined by Jérôme Bosch or Auguste Rodin. While the sculptor composed from plaster limbs and dressed from this reserve to arrange half-artificial, half-real figures, Annette Messager cuts up mannequins or model human limbs. All are covered by black wrap, the paper used in the theatre to mask or focus light from the spotlights. Combining elements of different scales, the artist has a penchant for marionettes or toys. In the installation Avec nos cheveux, she suspends artificial res and brown hairpieces from these black, matt and fragile hands and arms. Contemporary ex-voto offering, they spread over the wall like so many magical objects. The unsophisticated fastening – a clumsily executed bow and thread — renders them more familiar and even more trivial. From traditional tales to photographs of hysterical women and from fantastical literature to the romantic and minstrel-related paintings of the nineteenth century, long tresses have long been symbols of sorcery. In the twentieth century, this interpretation was enriched by the Surrealists, anthropology, and Louise Bourgeois: travesty, mana and power, childhood… Annette Messager adds these new trophies to her achievements: female adornments, sign of beauty or of modesty, from Ophelia to Mary Magdalene, in so many sensual and gentle gestures that uncover the world.
Barbara Forest, Annette Messager, Dessus Dessous, Musée des beaux-arts de Calais/Cité de la dentelle, Dilecta, 2015, Paris.
Avec nos cheveux (With our hair)
Synthetic hair, various objects, black wrap, acrylic paint
Variable dimensions, approx. 400 × 245 cm
2013—2015
After having exhausted the photographic image, Annette Messager went on to manipulate human bodies, dismembered and in relief. Body parts of women and men, the head of a chubby baby resembling a Chinese mask, an enormous breast... Hybrid associations as previously imagined by Jérôme Bosch or Auguste Rodin. While the sculptor composed from plaster limbs and dressed from this reserve to arrange half-artificial, half-real figures, Annette Messager cuts up mannequins or model human limbs. All are covered by black wrap, the paper used in the theatre to mask or focus light from the spotlights. Combining elements of different scales, the artist has a penchant for marionettes or toys. In the installation Avec nos cheveux, she suspends artificial res and brown hairpieces from these black, matt and fragile hands and arms. Contemporary ex-voto offering, they spread over the wall like so many magical objects. The unsophisticated fastening – a clumsily executed bow and thread — renders them more familiar and even more trivial. From traditional tales to photographs of hysterical women and from fantastical literature to the romantic and minstrel-related paintings of the nineteenth century, long tresses have long been symbols of sorcery. In the twentieth century, this interpretation was enriched by the Surrealists, anthropology, and Louise Bourgeois: travesty, mana and power, childhood… Annette Messager adds these new trophies to her achievements: female adornments, sign of beauty or of modesty, from Ophelia to Mary Magdalene, in so many sensual and gentle gestures that uncover the world.
Barbara Forest, Annette Messager, Dessus Dessous, Musée des beaux-arts de Calais/Cité de la dentelle, Dilecta, 2015, Paris.
Les Dépouilles (Skins)
Children’s clothes, emptied stuffed toys, string
Variable dimensions
1997—1998
Bodies, as physical and emotional containers, remain central in the artist’s subsequent practice. There is a word that recurs in Messager’s speech — dépouille — that has multiple meanings in French, ranging from a corpse to something stripped bare, to a body devoid of organs: dissected and emptied out. It can be used as either an adjective or a verb, and in relation to animals, suggests a skin or hide. It is a particularly apt word for much of Messager’s practice of the 1990s, which involved stripping the body bare, then opening it up to reveal its innermost secrets. (…) Speaking about her installation Les Dépouilles (Skins, 1997) Messager has expressed surprise at how much the children‘s suits and toys resembled Rorschach shapes when opened up and pined on the wall. They also suggest the painting of Francis Bacon — an artist greatly admired by Messager — with his flayed, sacrificial human subjects. Barthes employed the metaphor of the Flayed Man in relation to the lover who bares his soul, rendering him “vulnerable, defenceless to the slightest injuries”. Messager’s creatures are equally vulnerable to the artist’s scissors and pins, their tenderness and pain exposed to the viewer’s scrutiny.
Rachel Kent, Annette Messager: Motion / Emotion, Museum of Contemporary Australia, Sydney, 2014 pp.25-26
Les Dépouilles (Skins)
Children’s clothes, emptied stuffed toys, string
Variable dimensions
1997—1998
Bodies, as physical and emotional containers, remain central in the artist’s subsequent practice. There is a word that recurs in Messager’s speech — dépouille — that has multiple meanings in French, ranging from a corpse to something stripped bare, to a body devoid of organs: dissected and emptied out. It can be used as either an adjective or a verb, and in relation to animals, suggests a skin or hide. It is a particularly apt word for much of Messager’s practice of the 1990s, which involved stripping the body bare, then opening it up to reveal its innermost secrets. (…) Speaking about her installation Les Dépouilles (Skins, 1997) Messager has expressed surprise at how much the children‘s suits and toys resembled Rorschach shapes when opened up and pined on the wall. They also suggest the painting of Francis Bacon — an artist greatly admired by Messager — with his flayed, sacrificial human subjects. Barthes employed the metaphor of the Flayed Man in relation to the lover who bares his soul, rendering him “vulnerable, defenceless to the slightest injuries”. Messager’s creatures are equally vulnerable to the artist’s scissors and pins, their tenderness and pain exposed to the viewer’s scrutiny.
Rachel Kent, Annette Messager: Motion / Emotion, Museum of Contemporary Australia, Sydney, 2014 pp.25-26
